[I]sn't
the baud rate on midi ports/cables unusually high - far
higher than typical serial ports?
If I'm remembering right it's 31.5K,
which is not a standard serial
rate at all. Which means dedicated hardware, though it doesn't
strike me as being all that expensive hardware.
I'm not sure of the 31.5, but I'm quite sure it's not a "standard"
serial rate. Yes, it means specialized hardware, but not very;
practically any commodity serial chip can do it if you feed a suitable
clock to the baud-rate generator. NeXTen, at least the ones I've
messed with, have two clocks feeding their serial chips (with software
able to select which one is used) so they can do MIDI speeds and stock
serial speeds out the same port (not, of course, at the same time!).
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